Increase Responsiveness of Firefox

I was experiencing some difficulties in Firefox for the last two months. Firefox was unresponsive when it was loading websites which was hard to tolerate and almost made me switch completely to Opera. I could not relate this unresponsiveness to changes that I made to Firefox – be it config changes or add-ons that I installed or uninstalled during that time.

Today I found the solution mentioned at the How To Geek’s blog. He mentioned a setting in about:config that was specifying the time between the high and load frequency interrupt mode. Firefox changes modes depending on a user’s activity on a website. High Interrupt Mode interrupts the website parser more frequently for better responsiveness of Firefox while Low Frequency Mode loads the website faster but is unresponsive.

Type about:config in the address bar of Firefox and filter for the string Content.switch.threshold. If the key does not exist create a New > Integer with the name Content.switch.threshold and the value 1000000. The default value for the key is 750000 which caused the problem in first place.

The related keys content.notify.ontimer and content.interrupt.parsing must be set to TRUE, the preference would not have an effect otherwise. The value 1000000 sets the threshold value to 1 second which makes Firefox more responsive but increases load time slightly.

Related Articles:

Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday January 22, 2008 -
Tags:Firefox, firefox tips, firefox tweak, mozilla

Responses so far:

1. sarana says:

   January 22, 2008 at 10:01 pm

   Seems I also have neither content.notify.ontimer nor content.interrupt.parsing in my about:config settings. I suppose creating those will assure that those values are set to true?

   Thanks

   Reply
2. Martin says:

   January 22, 2008 at 11:48 pm

   Sarana yes you should add those two values and set them to true. It should work without setting them but to be on the safe side set them.

   Reply